First Breath
by Shinjite Florana
Summary: Still I continued to cry, unhappy with all this change, but Warmth held me tight to her. No, warmth had a new name now, suited to this new world—Mother. - The day of InuYasha's birth from the eyes of the newborn.
1. First Breath

Back from the dead after 4 years, I come with tales of College and Feudal Fairytales. I wanted this story to be one of a _bunch_ of one-shorts, but—let's be honest—that probably won't happen. So here's a story about babu InuYasha AS TOLD BY babu InuYasha.

It's more dramatic than you think!

* * *

My first gasping breath was startlingly easy. The comfortable heavy warmth of what normally filled my lungs was replaced by something thin, cold and light. The absolute lack of the substance invaded my body before my immediate rejection of it, only to suck in air again, instinctively, desperately.

The entirety of the environment was alien. A force I'd never truly felt before grasped at my raw body, binding me to this new world. What it pressed me too was hard and uncomfortable. Never before had I been subject to my own weight and the press of the floor against my skin.

My universe had expanded in an incredible mirror of a much larger reality, and in that moment I could feel myself small against an ever-reaching backdrop.

My skin was on fire with the new sensations battering me. Each one impressing it's greeting,

_You are one_

_You are small_

Fear crept tightly in my throat, tearing from me in wails. Was this life now? This cold abandonment? This insignificance? I couldn't quite remember what it had been before, but I missed it. I missed Home, I wanted Warmth. Warmth had always been there, surrounding. Home beat a steady lullaby of security, sometimes humming in deep comfort. But it was gone, replaced by this inconsequentiality.

Then a new sensation. It was tender and delicate in its movements. A shadow of Warmth in its touch, wrapping around me. It lifted me, supporting this new crushing weight of life, pulling me up toward it.

This new environment made my hair stiff, and it stuck about my face as I continued to whimper. This new Tenderness was now close and it gently pushed my hair back from my face, exposing it to the chilling air and I whined further.

"Welcome little one."

For the first moment since I entered this world I silenced. I knew this hum, it was the hum of Home, the voice of Warmth, more crisp than it had ever been. Even with the familiarity, I soon continued to wail. Warmth hummed further, soothing as it pulled me nearer. I felt her hair fall against my face in the closeness.

I was pulled into Warmth, returned, at least partially, into Home. I was pressed against this novel incarnation of her, soft against my small form. Here, so close, I could hear the lullaby of this new Warmth thump softly next to me.

Still I continued to cry, unhappy with all this change, but Warmth held me tight to her. No, Warmth had a new name now, suited to this new world.

Mother.

And for what felt like a long moment I stayed like that, pressed against her as the calming lullaby beat from her chest. But something changed.

It felt slow. The lullaby softened, stopped, started. The disruption continued. It faded like this, and the Tenderness that pressed me to her shook a moment and loosened as the song faded.

And then there was silence.

And I was alone.

This realization came suddenly to me and my cries only increased. Something was horribly wrong with Mother. She had never ceased singing to me. She had left me. I was alone.

This panic dimly sat in me as I wailed. I was one, I was small, I was weak. I could do nothing but release this primitive mourning, this cry for help.

It was cold being alone.

But it wasn't so cold anymore. It was starting to become warm. No, not warm, this was hot. Uncomfortably so.

A loud noise, crackling and splintering, made the world around me move slightly. Soon the heat surrounded me, threateningly. I wondered if this new existence of mine would change again, whether my brief life here would be snuffed so soon.

A stubbornness welled in my chest and I wailed louder in complaint, obstinate in my refusal to pass once more into the unfamiliar.

The spitting and moaning of the world around me grew louder. A world-shaking crush fell somewhere nearby.

"Izayoi!"

This new hum was foreign. Deep, desperate, and foreign. I continued to cry.

"Izayoi!" it repeated.

My eyes had yet to open since changing states to this uncomfortable one. They stayed scrunched closed as I continued to scream at this new world. Despite my blindness, I felt the shift of light through my eyelids and heard a horrendous crumble as something tipped above and around me.

"Izayoi." The hum uttered again. It was softer now, but very close. New noises accompanied this hum, this not Mother, strange and clinking. I felt him shift above me and Mother—but Mother was gone. I lay next to her hollow form.

A metallic sound, as foreign as everything else about this alien, came from above me. He hummed again, something my ears didn't catch over the heat's intense crackle around me.

I sucked in more air to let out in a roar of noise. It was becoming harder. Something in this new thin environment was becoming heavy. The air was now thicker and sticky. My body rejected it instinctually. The little air that forced its way between my eyelids stung, making warm tears leave raw trails down my cheeks.

More movement from not Mother. I continued to ignore him.

There was a sudden shiver from Mother's form. The Tenderness of Mother next to me moved. She gasped.

"Anata," she breathed the word softly.

This new player had brought back Mother. Anata. Anata had brought back Mother.

There was shifting about me. Mother's Tenderness grasped around me again, pulling me closer and lifting me up with her as she moved. Something heavy was laid about us.

Another touched me. Anata, I guessed. The touch was colder, more calloused than that of Mother's Tenderness, but with no ill intent. It pressed gently against my stomach, pinching something in front of me. A tugging weight fell from my body.

"You're hurt," Mother hummed.

Anata's touch lifted to my face and gently pressed against my cheek. There was a sharpness to his contact, pointed at each end of the individual pressures making up his touch.

"I am not long for this world." Anata hummed stoically, a delayed response to Mother's voice.

Mother's grip tightened around me. Through my tears I attempted to force my eyes open, but they only lifted a crack before the air, heavy with its blinding sting, forced them shut again, only briefly imprinting a blur of movement and color into my mind.

Anata's touch left my face briefly before returning. Something smooth and cold was in his grasp, its press against my skin revealing it to be round. The object pushed itself into the closed lid of my eye forcefully. The marble seemed to have a will other than Anata's, and it crawled its way through my skin, not tearing it apart, but into it. I didn't like this new discomfort and wailed.

Mother gasped.

"It won't hurt him," Anata's voice was quick and quiet.

Somewhere there was a crush, louder than the normal crackle and hiss that surrounded me. The feeling of the marble against my skin was gone. It had instead become a part of me. Its weight and press were gone and the discomfort it caused forgotten.

"I leave my Legacy to him."

_Clink clink._

Anata had moved. Mother mimicked him and I swayed, pressed against her softy.

There may have been a third hum now, another alien, but my wails tired me desperately, and my senses cared less and less about what was happening around me. Instead I wished for relief, desperate in this chaos.

"InuYasha."

Anata's hum was familiar now.

"The child will be called InuYasha." Something seemed so big about that voice, so encompassing even in this wide world.

"Live long."

Mother responded. She called to him, I could tell. "Anata!" she hummed like a mantra, like a prayer. But her hum was strained and pulled something tight in my heaving chest.

"Go." His voice was huge, it was something large and powerful and unbreakable.

And then we were moving. Mother shifted around me, and sounds moved past us. Soon the air thick with poison abated and the chill crisp that had first greeted my lungs returned, chiller and crisper than before.

Soon mother was heaving against me, her steady lullaby beating for me in a terrific frenzy. The air moved slower past us. And then for a moment all was still.

I didn't know.

I didn't know that this woman I called mother had paused on a hill-face and turned to look back at her home belching fire into the sky as it took the life of her beloved.

I didn't know that her legs shook and trembled with the strain of running barefoot through heavy snow, her insides wailing as loud as I was in complaint against the movement as a small line of crimson freckled the pure canvas of the snow as it trickled from between her legs.

It didn't really register when she slumped into the snowdrift and I quieted in her arms, tired from my unceasing tirade.

I did, at the time, feel the cold against my eyes as they finally cracked open for the first time. I did see the sky, a red-gray gradient as the flames and smoke painted above me. And I did see the face of my Mother, blurry but close to mine as she looked into my eyes for the first time.

But I didn't know.

I didn't know that she choked back a sob and smiled so blessedly at me as she recognized the golden eyes and instantly fell in love with them for a second time.

And I didn't know when we rose again and a woman that had given birth, died, resurrected, lost her husband, and escaped with her half-breed child and her life forced her frozen and aching legs to move, desperate to shelter me from all harm.

All this drama of my entrance into this world was lost on me.

Still she carried on.

* * *

Yaaay, AAALL DONE! So how was my 1st person, huh? Not very good, I know. Where 1st person is in some ways easier to write, it's defiantly harder to write _well._ I normally leave that to Jane Eyre and the Brontë sisters.

There was a lot about this story that worries me. Because it's from a newborn's perspective, I'm forced to be very vague and use a lot of sense words (Warmth, touch, hum). In the story Inu no Taishō does things like lay the robe of the firerat over them, sever InuYasha's umbilical cord, and place the black pearl in InuYasha's eye, all things that I'm not sure came across properly because of my limits as a writer.

Hopefully you still enjoyed. **THANK YOU SO MUCH!**

**PLEASE REVIEW!** I'd love some criticism!


	2. Preface

**Please read author's note at end**

* * *

The brush sat poised at the upper corner of the fresh page.

It would be more fair, perhaps, to say it sat poised there, unmoving, for quite

some

time.

It sat there because the occupant holding the brush, delicate and careful to not mark the page uncertainly, didn't know what to write.

No, that wasn't really fair. She knew what she wanted to write, the real problem, she accurately pinned, was how

on _earth_

to start.

It was not a blur. The past was distinct, dizzyingly crisp. Every moment, every pinprick, every stumble, every step was achingly, blinding, unforgettably vivid. Each face, etched in anger or kindness or fear was painted on the walls of her mind, and none more vividly that the comforting racket of babble from the two-something-year-old behind her.

Izayoi's thumb tapped lightly on her lap where it lay.

It had been two years already.

Two years and she had no idea how to start.

A low growl interrupted her thoughts a moment and she turned over her shoulder to watch. Her "little monster" stocked around a raggedy-stuffed toy defended by an elaborately built wall of wooden blocks. The golden-eyed toddler continued an unnaturally adept circle around the construct before pouncing upon it—admittedly less adeptly—bursting through the little walls to triumphantly tumble with toy, adding lovely sound effect of struggle for his mock battle.

Stilling suddenly, his ears turned, soon followed by his face, arching his neck from his new position on his back to lock eyes with the stare he felt on him. His mother smiled softly. Her child looked away, almost shyly, smiling to himself and resuming his play, perhaps more silently this time. Izayoi turned back.

She could start it with him. What a more appropriately place to start then with Inuyasha?

The brush shifted in her palm.

But it hadden't really started with him, it had _really_ started with _Him_.

She rolled the brush again in her grip.

But she wasn't sure if she could truly write about Him. Not out of some weakness or lingering sympathy, though she had plenty of those tucked away inside her, she was simply afraid she wouldn't do Him justice. No, she was absolutely, positively _sure_ she wouldn't be able to _do Him justice_. Because He didn't start with her, He had started long ago, long _long_ ago, and His origins even further so, tangled like roots of an ancient forest, so old and so dense the beginning of one tree and the end of another was indecipherable.

No, she couldn't start with Him.

So she couldn't start with him either.

She lifted the brush form the page, holding it aloft before returning her hand.

Could she?

Again the fingers of her free hand drummed. Writing a diary had never been so hard before—before Him—even _with_ Him!—she had been able to dutifully record her thoughts, perhaps not daily, perhaps not completely, but sufficiently, without struggle.

But this was different.

She had fallen out of the habit. The past two years had never allowed her to pick up the forgotten ritual but _now_—now she could. Now she _should_, something told her.

The something sometimes referred to as Inuyasha babbled behind her, accompanied by the sound of wood blocks falling. There was a brief angry screech before a low growl and then sound of said fallen blocks being gathered.

Izayoi sighed.

Anywhere. Anywhere would be fine, really. Her life of leisure before she encountered Him. Her tangled history, binding strangely with His. His end and Inuyasha's beginning. Perhaps the small hut the night of the event, where cold toes red with frostbite soaked painfully in the lukewarm water as she held a bawling infant to her breast. Or the whore house she could hardly believe she even _entered_ let alone hid at for those desperate days.

Or even here. Warm and quite in an estate comparable to the comfort she once lived in, stunning and unreal in light of her situation. The order wasn't that important, she reasoned. Perhaps not even the content. But the _moments_. She could, perhaps, not capture, but _record_ the moments splashed across her mind like a breathtaking canvas. That seemed to be what mattered.

It didn't need to be perfect, because she could never achieve perfect. But it needed to be written. So Izayoi lowered her brush to the page to write.

But the impatient ink was dry, and the parchment came away clean.

And Izayoi leaned back her head and laughed.

* * *

**Please Read**

Hey there Reader! So I completed First Breath a while ago- it was the first hint of my obsession for the untold story of Inu no Taishō and Izayoi as well as Inuyasha's early youth. As it stands currently, I have a loose plot (as cannon as my ridiculously obsessed mind can make it) for the tale of Inu no Taishō and Izayoi and around 7,000 words for unposted babble about them as well as child Inu and his mama. I have refrained from posting them because I have _never_ finished a long suffered witting project and to leave another half written seems cruel.

That having been said, I think I'm there. I think I need to start posting this unfinished mess- to get feedback if nothing else. I have not written linearly and think it unlikely i'll do so with any consistency in the future. Some pieces are long, some pieces are short, and some pieces don't make a lick of sense because I haven't filled in the gaps in-between. Some are pre Inuyasha, some are post Inu no Taishō death, and all are sitting in Word,

staring at me.

This is a plea for feedback. Should I wait (i still have a lot more to write, unfinished is generous), post (get followers, get encouragement, get feedback!), get a Beta (never done that before, though...)-whatever you're willing to give me, I'll listen.

Feel free to both PM me and/or **REVEIW!**


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